Beauty for Ashes (2 page)

Vanna looked at her sister in admiration. She seemed so cool, so collected, yet there was something terrifying in her eyes. Vanna put her hand to her throat and tried to still the stifling sensation that threatened to overwhelm her. Oh, it seemed just impossible that this tragedy was really happening in their family. Stan, the handsome brother-in-law, dead! Just a week before the wedding!

Then she began to realize.

There would be no wedding!

Over there in the green guest room closet were hanging the bridesmaids’ dresses, soft spring pastel shades of chiffon, with silver shoes and lovely big garden hats wreathed in spring blossoms. Back in the apricot guest room, the bridal array was waiting and there would be
no wedding!

Three long connecting rooms to the left were cleared and furnished with long draped tables on which already a goodly array of costly glitter was set out, and the presents were pouring in every hour! And there would be no wedding!

But Gloria went steadily on arranging her dress, smoothing her rumpled curls, putting her brush away, as coolly as if nothing had happened. Didn’t she realize what it all meant? Why wasn’t she lying on her bed sobbing? Why wasn’t she breaking her heart? Stan dead, Stan whom Gloria adored, and Gloria going about with a quiet, stony look in her eyes! Vanna was frightened.

“Does Mother know?” asked Gloria suddenly in that quiet, capable tone that was so new to her, as if she had certain things to go through and just so much strength with which to go through them.

“No,” said Vanna, “she hasn’t gone downstairs yet.”

“Does Mrs. Asher know?”

“Yes, Nance said she was in hysterics. They had sent for the doctor,” said Vanna.

“Poor thing!” said Gloria with a terrible trembling sigh.

Vanna stared. She knew Gloria was not especially fond of Stan’s mother, and yet here she was without a tear for herself, pitying Stan’s mother.

Gloria dropped into a chair and began to read the paper, her white face growing even whiter as she read. Once she groaned aloud, and once she looked up and said, though more as if she were stating a fact to herself than speaking to her sister, “He’d known that girl for a long time. There had been trouble before. Two years ago! That was before—before we were—engaged!” She looked at the paper again. “No—it was after! Two months after! Oh—!” The sound she made was not a sob. It was more like a wounded animal getting to cover.

Vanna was silent, filled with misery for the sister who had always been so much a part of herself. She was feeling what Gloria was going through. Neither of these girls had had any sorrow in their lives before beyond a broken doll or a lost kitten. Never any trouble before that money could not mend.

From where she sat, Vanna could see the gleam of the tiled roof that was her sister’s new home. What would Gloria do now with that house? Would Dad have it torn down? Would they all move or go to Europe or something? How everything had been upheaved and made impossible in a single night! A bullet gone home, a heart stilled, and two families were plunged into dismay, their world collapsed!

Vanna began to think of the young set that made up their social life. How could they bear to go among them again? How could Gloria ever enjoy the crowd and all its doings with Stan gone! And gone in such a terrible way!

Suddenly she caught her breath and put her head down on the arm of the chair where she sat, the tears coming like a tempest over which she had no control.

“Vanna! You mustn’t!” said Gloria, looking at her out of those stony eyes. “We’ve got to keep up!”

“Why?” said Vanna tempestuously.
“Why?
You ought to cry too, Glory! It’ll help you a lot. You’ll break down if you don’t cry.”

“I can’t!” said Gloria. “The tears are all locked inside! They can’t get out! Vanna, do you think I ought to go and see Mrs. Asher?”

“No,” said Vanna vehemently. “Nance said she was wild. They had given her a sleeping powder. She wouldn’t see you if you went. Nance said the doctor said they must get her quieted down.”

Gloria sank back in her chair again and looked hungrily down at the paper whose flaring headlines had been followed by very little other information concerning the tragedy. Gloria had read every word over twice already, yet she took up the paper and searched earnestly for one more little word. Oh, if there was only so much as a hint of denial that that girl had been anything before to Stan! But there it all was printed out cruelly, just two or three lines, but each word ripe to stimulate the imagination, hints that were worse than the truth could possibly be!

Then suddenly the mother was among them, standing at the door, a look of generalship upon her.

“Gloria! My poor child!” she mourned. “To think that this should have happened to you and just now before the wedding! It makes it so awkward for you! But child dear, you should go right to bed. You mustn’t think of being up. A trouble like this drains one’s strength. Besides, it is so much easier to excuse you to any mistaken friends who might think they had to call if we can just say you are resting. Get to bed right away, honey dear, and conserve your strength.”

“No, Mother,” said Gloria, “I’m not going to bed. I’d go wild in bed!”

Gloria got up and began to pace up and down her room. Her mother watched her with a puzzled look.

“You’re a strange girl!” she said almost disapprovingly. “If you take it that way, we shall have you sick on our hands before”— she hesitated for the fraction of a second and Gloria shivered as if a cold draught had struck her—“before this is over,” the mother finished.

“It will never be over!” said Gloria in a hollow, terrible, young voice.

“Oh, yes, it will!” said her mother quickly. “Of course you can’t see that now, but it’s a merciful thing that sorrows don’t engulf people forever. However, it’s much better just to give way naturally to your grief and not try to keep up and hide your feelings.”

Gloria looked at her mother as if she did not hear her and went on walking up and down her room.

The mother gave her another hopeless look and turned as if she would go out, then looked back to say, “We’ll all have to have some black clothes of course. What a pity in the spring of the year! I’ll go and call up Sampson’s and have them send out some things on approval. That’s another reason, Gloria, why you ought to lie down now. You’ll have to try on you know, and that’s almost as wearing as having to go downtown shopping for clothes.”

Gloria turned in consternation. “Mother! I’m not going to try on clothes today! No, nor any of these days! One doesn’t have to dress for the part to suffer! I’ll wear something I’ve got, anything! But I won’t have anything to do with clothes at such a time as this!”

“Now Gloria, do try to be reasonable! You can’t just ignore the customs of society that way!”

“Look here, Mother, I’m not going out on exhibition! I shan’t probably see anybody at all except the Ashers, and you don’t suppose they’ll care what clothes I have on, do you?”

“I certainly do!” said the calm voice of the mother. “You must be appropriately dressed. If you’re not, they would think, and rightly, that you had not the proper respect for their feelings.”

“Mother, if they can care about things like that now, I don’t care what they think! I have plenty of clothes, and I’m not going to bother about others!”

“But black, dear! You must wear black!”

“Well, I already have two or three black dresses, if it’s got to be black!”

“But they are not mourning, child, and you in your position— the—”

But suddenly Gloria gave a scream and rushed from the room. “Don’t! Don’t!
Don’t!”
she cried in a low, hurt voice, and fled upstairs to the great attic room that had been the children’s playroom when they were little and where corners and crannies still held dollhouses and baby carriages and the toys of long ago. Vanna found her there an hour later when she went anxiously in search of her, curled up in a little heap by one of the dormer windows, staring wide-eyed out across the hillside and the woods, down toward the stone bungalow among the trees, the bungalow that was to have been her beautiful home. There was tragedy in her eyes, but there was not a trace of a tear yet.

Vanna dropped down beside her and put her arm around her.

“Glory dear,” she whispered, “Nance is downstairs. She wants to see you. She says she
must
see you. Do you feel able to speak to her a minute, or shall I tell her you are asleep?”

Gloria was still a minute, and then she rose quietly.

“I’ll see her,” she said, still in that toneless voice that seemed so terrible to her sister. “Where is she?”

“Down in the library. Would you rather I brought her up to your room?”

“No,” said Gloria, “I don’t know why I should make you do all the work. I’ll go down.”

Nance was wearing a smart tweed dress of black and white mixture and a black felt hat, and was smoking a cigarette as she stood looking out the long french window to the lovely sloping lawn. She whirled about as Gloria entered, nervously crushing out the cigarette in the ashtray that stood on the little end table by her side.

She fixed hard, solemn eyes on the girl who was to have been her sister-in-law so soon and stared. It was as if she were searching her very soul through and through. And Gloria stood there like a thing at bay and took it, with just that quiet, inexplicable look on her face. Vanna stood by and watched her, marveling at her sister.

Then Nance spoke in a hard, tired voice.

“I said you’d take it just that way!” she remarked, opening her cigarette case and getting out another cigarette. “Mother said you’d be simply crushed, but I knew you had character! I’ve always said you had character. I’ve always known you were too good for Stan!”

Gloria winced and caught her breath in as if the words hurt her.

“Oh don’t, Nance, please!” she said pleadingly.

“Well, it’s true!” said the sister, her voice sailing up a note or two in the octave, a high, shrill, overwrought voice. “Stan was spoiled! I suppose we all helped to do it!”

She took one puff at her cigarette and flung it on the ashtray with the stumps of several others she had played with before the girls came down to her. Then she turned and began to pace up and down the room with long, masculine strides.

“My nerves are all shot to pieces!” she remarked, coming up in front of Gloria again and facing her almost defiantly.

“I had no business to come over here this way!” she went on. “I know it! But I couldn’t stand Mother groaning and carrying on any longer! And I had to see how you were taking it!”

Gloria gave her a little wistful attempt at a smile, so sad that Vanna over in the window seat put down her head on the back of a leather chair and sobbed quietly. Gloria put out a gentle hand and touched the other girl on her arm!

“I’m sorry, Nance!” she quavered, “I know—it must be—
terrible—for
you!”

Nance whirled on her fiercely. “Oh, and isn’t it terrible for you, then?” she demanded.

“Oh—!” Gloria drew in her breath with a suffering sound. “Oh—but in a different way!”

“How different, I’d love to know?” It was as if Nance had come with a knife to probe the wound in this girl’s breast, find the bullet, and rub the wound with salty words.

Gloria was silent for a moment, her face averted, and then she answered slowly, hesitatingly, “The girl, Nance—you—don’t have to—mind—her! You—don’t have—to think—about her at all!”

Nance stared at her averted face. “Oh,
that!”
she said contemptuously. “That’s nothing! You don’t mean to say you’re bothering about her! They all do things like that today. It doesn’t mean a thing! I thought you had more sense!”

“Yes, it does mean—a great deal!” said Gloria slowly, her hard, sad, young eyes looking far away through the window down the slope of the hill. “It sort of wipes out—a lot—that
was—dear!”
Her words came slower, her eyelids drooped, her lips drooped at their corners and were trembling as she spoke. “It makes it—he doesn’t seem—to belong to me—anymore!”

Gloria suddenly dropped into a chair and dropped her gaze to the floor, but there came no tears. The tears were all slowing down into her heart. They seemed to drown her inside, but she lifted her eyes and met the cold gaze of Nance, saw the curl of her lip.

“I didn’t think you had a
jealous
nature!” The words cut like knives.

Gloria shook her head. “It’s not jealousy!” she said. “It’s something wider, more final than jealousy. Jealousy you feel for a day and get over. This is something that puts me out into another sphere somehow, just makes me feel he never has belonged to me—None of it—has ever—been—real!”

Nance looked into those hopeless, lovely eyes and tried to break their look with her own glance. But Gloria’s eyes did not change.

“How absurd!” said Nance. “Stan worshipped the very ground you walked on, Glory. He couldn’t say enough about you at home. He was simply crazy about you!”

Gloria looked at her as if she were not looking into her eyes at all, but saw something beyond her, something that outweighed what had been said.

“Yes?” she answered in that strange voice that sounded like a negative. Nance drew her brows together and studied her.

“Oh, Gloria, don’t be difficult—now—when all this is happening! Don’t be trivial! I know it’s hard on you, but don’t get notions. Everybody in our set knows how devoted Stan was to you!”

“Yes?” said Gloria again and still looked at that vision of a strange girl in the distance just beyond Nance’s head. A girl that was not of her kind. A girl who was no respecter of other people’s rights. A girl lying dead beside
her
bridegroom.

“Gloria, you’re not going to make more trouble, are you?” Nance spoke sharply, with a kind of hard agony in her voice.

“Make trouble?” said Gloria in a soft, amazed voice. “I make trouble? There is no trouble left to make, is there Nance? No, of course I’m not going to make trouble. I’m aching for you now, for the trouble you have already to bear. Is there anything that I can do to help in any way? I have a feeling there is something I should be doing, but I can’t seem to think what it is!”